Alcohol monitoring and teens

Monitoring your liquor supply in your home is really just a smaller facet of a larger issue parents deal with. If you've got teenagers in your house, you need to up your game. You need to be sharper, you need to be more aware, you need to be more observant because teenagers are incredibly complex and very active. If you do have alcohol in your house and teenagers in your house at the same time, like many safe and sane parents do, it's time to start thinking about how your alcohol is stored. The first basic rule here would be out of sight, out of mind. That glorious bar that you've always had in your home, maybe that needs to go in the cabinet for a couple of years while your teenager lives with you. When they go away to college, you can take it back out. If you want to control your liquor, one of the things you need to do is have a general idea of how much you have on hand at any given moment. If you had a case of beer last night and this morning you don't, and no one came over to visit, it's time to ask your son where your beer went. It's also important to monitor what we call your clear liquors: gin, vodka, rum, tequila. Check your clear liquors every once in a while to make sure that they still contain liquor and don't just contain water. Some parents actually try to mark their bottles, they'll try and figure out a formula of marking their bottles. A restauranteur said that the only way to mark bottles that your kids won't be able to figure out is this: turn your hand upside down and grab the bottle, tip it upside down, mark it and put it back on its base in the cabinet and your kids will never figure it out.

Jonathan Scott

Drug Prevention Speaker, Author & Dad

Miles to Go educators, Jonathan and Kelly are professional speakers, writers and parents who specialize in drug prevention education for students, teachers and parents. Working from their base in Southern California, they have spent the past 17 years lecturing in the private school community using humor, science and multi-sensory teaching techniques to simplify a complex subject. Their first book, Not All Kids Do Drugs came out in 2010 and their second The Mother’s Checklist of Drug Prevention in 2011. Their third book, Where’s The Party was published in 2012.

Monitoring your liquor supply in your home is really just a smaller facet of a larger issue parents deal with. If you've got teenagers in your house, you need to up your game. You need to be sharper, you need to be more aware, you need to be more observant because teenagers are incredibly complex and very active. If you do have alcohol in your house and teenagers in your house at the same time, like many safe and sane parents do, it's time to start thinking about how your alcohol is stored. The first basic rule here would be out of sight, out of mind. That glorious bar that you've always had in your home, maybe that needs to go in the cabinet for a couple of years while your teenager lives with you. When they go away to college, you can take it back out. If you want to control your liquor, one of the things you need to do is have a general idea of how much you have on hand at any given moment. If you had a case of beer last night and this morning you don't, and no one came over to visit, it's time to ask your son where your beer went. It's also important to monitor what we call your clear liquors: gin, vodka, rum, tequila. Check your clear liquors every once in a while to make sure that they still contain liquor and don't just contain water. Some parents actually try to mark their bottles, they'll try and figure out a formula of marking their bottles. A restauranteur said that the only way to mark bottles that your kids won't be able to figure out is this: turn your hand upside down and grab the bottle, tip it upside down, mark it and put it back on its base in the cabinet and your kids will never figure it out.